


The Art of Dying

by on_my_toes



Category: Misfits
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-01-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 12:50:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/622316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/on_my_toes/pseuds/on_my_toes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"At the time it seemed like the only way out. Quick. Painless. Permanent. Nathan doesn’t know what would have happened if he had followed through, but at the time he didn’t really care, because he couldn’t imagine a hell worse than the one he was already enduring."</p>
<p>Nathan has some time to appreciate the irony of his immortality. Exploration of what might have happened if Nathan hadn't been lying about his mother's ex-boyfriend, and what happens when he resurfaces after the storm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of Dying

**Author's Note:**

> In case it's not clear, the point of view alternates between present Nathan (after he gets dug up, before the whole thing with Jamie) and twelve-year-old Nathan, who is depicted in italics.

Nathan doesn’t appreciate the irony of his immortality until a few days after they dig him up. It isn’t something he thinks about, really, when he feels the pressure of six feet of dirt suffocating the air in his lungs; when he’s hovering in an excruciating, endless cycle between life and death and fending off the greedy worms he wakes up to crawling over his skin; when the pangs of hunger seem to pierce every bone in his body and he can’t even afford the mercy of curling into himself because there isn’t enough room in the casket to move.

 

No, it isn’t until a few days after, when he has finally scrubbed himself clean and gotten his stomach to settle and returned to some semblance of normalcy that Nathan appreciates the irony of his immortality: the irony of staring into the barrel of his father’s handgun, alone in his bedroom, his breath coming in harsh, unregulated waves as he prepares to take his own life.

 

At the time it seemed like the only way out. Quick. Painless. _Permanent_. Nathan doesn’t know what would have happened if he had followed through, but at the time he didn’t really care, because he couldn’t imagine a hell worse than the one he was already enduring.

 

It’s surprisingly easy to press the whole matter into himself, to compartmentalize it into some tiny portion of his brain he never visits. Nathan does not feel sorry for himself the same way he doesn’t feel sorry for anyone. He knows what kind of world he lives in—a world that is every man for himself, a world where the fittest survive, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to let something stupid and inconsequential from his past weigh him down.

 

That is, until he is unexpectedly facing his past square in the eye.

 

It’s a Tuesday and it’s chilly. Nathan has been out of his grave for exactly four days. He and the others are scraping graffiti off a tunnel wall in the park and painting over it, or at least they’re supposed to be. Alisha and Curtis are making eyes at each other and Kelly and Simon are having what might possibly be the dullest conversation Nathan has ever heard, which he full intends to disrupt in his usual manner when he looks toward the figure moving on his right and sees him.

 

Patrick.

 

He looks away, too quickly, and checks the ground for his paint roller. He needs to look busy. He needs to disappear. He looks over and Simon, suddenly hating him with every fiber of his being for his ability, and in the process of grappling for his roller and actively sending beams of hatred toward Simon’s head he accidentally knocks over and spills an entire bucket of paint.

 

“Jesus, Nathan,” Alisha exclaims, jumping out of the paint’s path so it won’t get on her shoes. “What the fuck?”

 

Nathan freezes. She just _had_ to say his name. He can practically feel Patrick’s stare on his back.

 

“Great, now we’ll be out here all fucking day,” Curtis adds.

 

Nathan stands there for a moment, paralyzed and watching the paint run down the sidewalk and slips into the cracks in the concrete, unable to believe how stupid he is. They’re expecting him to say something snarky, and he will—just as soon as he looks over his shoulder, because it might just be some man, it might not be Patrick at all.

 

When he turns around, there’s nobody there.

 

 “Nathan?” asks Kelly. Her eyebrows are furrowed at him. _Fuck_. He doesn’t know what she has heard, but it’s already too much.

 

“What?” he exclaims, spreading his arms wide, hoping his words are louder than his thoughts. “The lot of you are so mind-numbingly boring, can you blame a guy for trying to get high off the paint fumes just to escape it all for a merciful moment? I mean Jesus,” he emphasizes, gesturing toward Kelly and Simon, “You were talking about what time you went to bed last night, it’s like hanging out with a bunch of vegetables. If immortality means years of _this_ then good god I’m going to have to find a way to die, and _soon_.”

 

“Prick,” Alisha mutters. Curtis has already turned away. Simon stares at him in that reserved, eerie way that he always does, and Kelly stares at him with an entirely bewildered expression, as if she is going to probe into his thoughts again.

 

“I’ve got to piss,” he mutters, taking off before she can hear anything more.

 

\-- 

 

_“Hey, champ.”_

_Nathan is twelve years old when he meets Patrick. Patrick is not his mother’s first boyfriend since his dad walked out on them, but he is the first that his mother has worked up the nerve to introduce him to, which is remarkable enough to set Nathan on edge._

_Patrick extends his hand, crouching a bit to meet Nathan’s eye level. “Your mum’s told me a lot about you. Nice to finally meet.”_

_Nathan stares back at him. Broad chin, thick brows, a wide nose. He reminds Nathan of a caveman. Nathans eyes narrow._

_“Sod off.”_

_It doesn’t sound nearly as threatening or biting as Nathan imagined it would—puberty is still wrestling with his vocal chords and nothing sounds quite right—but still, he expects the man to react. Expects his eyebrows to raise or his mouth to fall open or any of the typical responses to Nathan’s barb._

_What happens instead is far more unsettling. It is a moment, a sensation, really, that Nathan will never forget—the curl of Patrick’s smile and the sudden, unwelcome heat of his eyes watching, drinking Nathan in, his gaze lingering in places nobody has ever lingered before. It is a moment that Nathan feels, for the first time, unsafe in his own home. It’s too long, its too much, the intensity of Patrick’s stare, that Nathan can’t quite bring himself to suck air back into his lungs._

_Patrick claps a hand on Nathan’s shoulder. Nathan jerks back, but not in enough time to conceal the shudder running up his spine._

_Then he smiles. Not a caveman, Nathan decides, but an animal, something ugly and smart and mean._

_“I like you already.”_

\-- 

 

Nathan is late to finish sorting out his stuff after the day because he probation worker flags him down for the necessary paperwork to put him back in the system, now that he is miraculously undead. He thinks he is alone until he hears footsteps shuffling in the other row of lockers. He freezes, his heart leaping into his throat.

 

No. He’s in the community center. Patrick won’t be here.

 

“Nathan?”

 

He hears Kelly’s voice before he sees her and wants to slam his forehead into the locker with frustration. Of course it’s her. Of course she’s heard _everything_.

 

“Come to sneak a peek at me naked?” he says. He has learned that if he can get a rise out of her she’ll generally leave him and his thoughts alone. “If you wanted a glimpse of the goods, love, all you had to do was ask.”

 

Kelly sets her hands on her hips, a sour expression on her face. “Ya done?”

 

He grins at her, snapping the waistband of his orange uniform. “Bragging about my massive cock? I could go on all day.”

 

He expects her to roll her eyes or cuff him like she usually does, but instead she raises her eyebrows at him, looking at him meaningfully. He looks away, pretending to focus on the contents of his locker, trying to keep his thoughts firmly locked on nipple clamps or anal sex or other filthy things that will hopefully repulse her away from digging any further into the depths of his mind.

 

“That man at the park today—wot’s the deal wiff ‘im?”

 

Nathan shuts his eyes for just a moment because she can’t see him from behind the locker door. “You fancy some wanker in the park, huh?” he asks. “Is he everything you ever dreamed of?”

 

“ _Nath_ an.”

 

He slams his locker door shut, maybe a little too hard. “Don’t know what man you’re talking about,” he tries instead.

 

She considers him for a moment, her eyebrows still set in that determined, almost concerned way. He can’t look at her, he can’t think at all if he wants any of this to stay buried, so he does what he does best and wrecks the tenderness of the moment by gesturing obscenely toward his crotch and saying, “Well look at this, the two of us are finally alone—”

 

“Forget it,” she says, shaking her head and leaving.

 

Nathan waits until the footsteps leave to slump down by his locker and heave his one large, sorry sigh, letting himself indulge in self-pity for a few seconds. It probably wasn’t even Patrick at all. The trouble is he likes Kelly, he likes her a lot, but it seems even with Patrick long gone the man still finds clever ways to fuck up Nathan’s life.

 

\-- 

 

_It starts with a knock on his bedroom door._

_Nathan doesn’t answer. It’s nine o’clock at night, it could only be his mum, and she’ll come in whether or not he wants her to. He figures she is turning in early and is coming in to tell him good night._

_The door creaks open. Nathan sets his video game on pause and puts down the handheld device. “I was almost finished with my history homework, sheesh,” he mutters._

_“Is that the truth?”_

_Nathan’s head jerks up with a start. “You,” he says, perceiving Patrick’s tall frame crouching in his doorway. Nathan is wearing nothing but his boxers and he has the sudden urge to throw his blankets over himself, but he doesn’t want to call attention to it, trying to appear casual and nonplussed. For some reason it seems important to Nathan that Patrick not think he’s able to get under his skin._

_Patrick stands in his doorway. His eyes trail up and down Nathan’s body, lingering on his bare chest. Nathan tries not to shiver, twisting his features into a scowl._

_“What are you looking at, pervert?” he asks, with the intention of embarrassing him enough that he will leave._

_He doesn’t. One corner of his mouth curls up in a way that makes Nathan wish he hadn’t said anything at all._

_“It’s just you and me tonight, champ,” Patrick drawls, taking a step into Nathan’s bedroom. He looks around at Nathan’s walls, a small relief from staring at his bare skin. Nathan follows his gaze as he takes in the posters and memorabilia—at twelve all Nathan’s interests betray his conflicted state of mind, a mix of books about space travel and aliens and the magazines of naked women he nicked from his friend’s older brother. Nathan flushes as Patrick spends too long considering the items in his room before slowly dragging his gaze back to Nathan._

_“What do you mean?” asks Nathan. “Where’s my mum?”_

_“Resting,” says Patrick. “She’s turned in early for the night, it seems.”_

_“Well, then,” says Nathan, “congratulations. You bored her to death. Now are you going to leave or go have a wank in the kitchen?”_

_“You’ve got quite the mouth, haven’t you?”_

_The way he says it is so possessive, as if he knows Nathan, as if he is already anticipating his every word and move. Nathan’s uneasiness is replaced by annoyance, and he says without much ceremony, “Get out of my room.”_

_Patrick raises his eyebrows, not in the least thrown by Nathan’s words. “I thought the two of us might get to know each other.”_

_Nathan snorts. “Please,” he says cattily, to hide his mounting discomfort. “You’ll be gone within the week.”_

_“On the contrary,” says Patrick, his voice smooth and confident and fear-provoking, “I intend to stick around for a very long time.”_

_It isn’t until he shuts the door that Nathan’s heart really starts to pound, that he gets the impression that something about this situation is inherently and startlingly wrong. Maybe he should yell for his mother, but the words are stuck in his throat—he doesn’t want to blow this out of proportion, because maybe Patrick just talks like this and God knows Nathan has gotten enough flack from his mother for not getting along with people, and besides, he doesn’t want Patrick to have the satisfaction of scaring him._

_That is, of course, long before Nathan understands what fear is._

_Patrick crosses the room and sits on the edge of Nathan’s bed, so close that he is nudging against Nathan’s mostly naked body from under the blankets. “So what do you say, champ?” he says. His teeth seem to glow in the dim light. “How about the two of us get to know each other?”_

_And just like that, his hand is on Nathan’s bare chest, his palm running down his skin and pressing closer to the seam of his boxers._

_“What the **f—** ”_

 

_Patrick clamps a hand over Nathan’s mouth. Nathan’s first reaction is to scream and to scream bloody murder, but the sound is so effectively muffled by Patrick’s hand that he doubts if anyone can hear him, least of all his mother, asleep in her room all the way across the house. The panic wells up in his chest, hot and urgent, and as Patrick’s other hand creeps under his boxers he uses the adrenaline to thrash with all of his might and wring his body away._

_He is no match. He is scrawny, has always been scrawny, and thanks to the merciless gods of puberty he is barely over five feet tall. He doesn’t know when Patrick set the entirety of his body on the bed but now he feels the weight of him pressing into the mattress, creaking and groaning with every shift._

_Nathan screams and screams until he thinks he might be suffocating, because there are black splotches in the periphery of his vision. Only then does it occur to him to bite down on Patrick’s hand; he saw it once in a movie, but in the movie, of course, the attacker was so thrown off that the hero sprung away and ran to safety._

_In his case, Nathan bites down and hears in rapid succession the sound of Patrick hissing a curse, the slap of a hand against the side of his cheek and the horrifying, whipping sensation of Patrick’s hand digging into his hair to pull his head back and then thrash it into the wall._

_The room is black and Nathan thinks his eyes are shut, then thinks someone has turned off the lights, and then realizes that his eyes are open and he is completely blind._

_“I can’t—I can’t—”_

_He doesn’t know why his vision is his top concern at a moment when a strange man is straddling him on his twin bed and ripping his boxers off. Nathan keeps screaming, or at least he thinks he is, until he feels the rough end of a piece of fabric push its way into his mouth; he tries to keep yelling, but the trouble is his nose is clogged with tears and panic and despair and he can’t get in a breath, he can’t breathe at all._

_He tries, in a last, desperate attempt at freedom, to claw at Patrick with his fingernails, to claw at whatever flesh he can reach, and that’s when he realizes that Patrick has taken off his clothes as well. A sob tries to escape him, but there isn’t any air left; his lungs are concave and empty and tight as he kicks and thrashes, thinking his chest might burst from the pressure._

_It is about the moment that Nathan is sure he is going to die when he feels Patrick’s rough hands grabbing the sides of his arms, bruising him, flipping him over onto his stomach. Nathan has never been told much about sex, not enough to know what is about to happen to him, but something dark and primal stirs in his gut and despite it all, he knows exactly what Patrick is about to do._

 

_He gasps unsuccessfully one more time and feels himself slipping away just as the first wave of unfamiliar, white-hot pain flashes through him, and not for the last time, Nathan hopes he never wakes up._

 

\-- 

 

The day after Nathan sees Patrick at the park, the lot of them are cleaning litter off the side of the highway. Everybody is unusually quiet. It looks like Curtis and Alisha might have gotten into some sort of a fight, he can only guess from the way they are keeping their distance from each other, and normally he would do anything in his power to exploit the awkwardness but it just isn’t in him at the moment. He’s tired. He didn’t sleep much the night before. And besides, he is focused mostly on avoiding Kelly, and loudly thinking up the dirtiest rap lyrics he can think of to deter her from prying again.

 

“Nathan.”

 

He hears Simon the first time, but he ignores him. He can feel Simon’s shadow hovering behind him and feels a flash of irritation toward the boy. He jabs at another piece of trash, hoping Simon will just leave him alone, but of course he doesn’t.

 

“Nathan,” Simon says again, louder.

 

Nathan wheels around. “What, Barry?” he asks impetuously.

 

Simon’s face is screwed up in that ominous way it usually is before he says something that will ruin Nathan’s day.

 

“That man—I think he’s staring at you,” Simon says, almost out of the corner of his mouth, his head nodding to Nathan’s left.

 

Nathan can’t help but twist his neck in an effort to follow Simon’s gaze. It’s Patrick, and somehow he knows it before he looks over. It is apparent that Patrick has been waiting for him to look over, that he hasn’t torn his eyes off Nathan in a long time. His leer is so familiar and unsettling that Nathan feels the blood drain from his face.

 

“Who is he?” asks Simon, his voice sounding urgent.

 

Nathan looks over at Simon, whose eyes are wide and staring at him. Only then does Nathan realize he has dropped the stick he was using to collect trash and that he has taken several stumbling steps backwards.

 

“How the fuck would I know?” asks Nathan, wrenching his stick up from off the ground. He starts jabbing indiscriminately at the ground with it, trying to recover by saying to Simon, “What is he, one of your whores? It’s really not fair to subject all of us to that, Barry, whatever happens between you and the men who pay you in that back alley should _stay in that back alley_ , so help you god.”

 

“You’re such a _dick_ ,” Kelly interjects, still sore from yesterday.

 

“The biggest dick of them all! Who wants a peek, I know _Kelly’s_ fancied a look-see since the day we first met—”

 

“He’s gone,” says Simon, in that quiet voice that Nathan usually blusters right over.

 

And then everyone’s gaze is turned over to the spot where Patrick was just standing. Alisha, Curtis, Kelly—their gazes all shift to follow Simon’s, into the empty space where Patrick was just leering in his direction. A beat passes and then, mortifyingly, they all turn toward to Nathan.

 

“Guess he’s bored with you, Barry. Can’t teach an old whore new tricks,” says Nathan, turning his back to all of them.

 

Simon doesn’t say anything, his stare grave.

 

“Is that the guy from yesterday?” asks Kelly, crossing her arms and squinting at Nathan under the glare of the sun.

 

He shifts his weight uncomfortably. “So what’s the deal with beauty and the beast over here?” he deflects, gesturing at Curtis and Alisha. “I can’t help but notice the two of you haven’t eye-fucked even once today. Trouble in paradise?”

 

“Fuck off,” says Alisha.

 

“Ohh, tapped a nerve, have I?” Nathan exclaims. He pretends to wince as he turns to Curtis and says, “Fuck, man, I bet you’ll miss all that rousing, hair-raising sex—oh. Wait a second …”

 

It doesn’t matter, they’re all ignoring him again. He rambles on half-heartedly a bit longer as he separates himself from the group, taking a few casual steps away until it turns into several yards of distance, wondering how far he has to get to be out of Kelly’s range.

 

Not far enough. He feels his palms start to slick with sweat, the stick in his hand coming loose. His heart is thudding between his ears and suddenly he feels like someone has punched the back of both of his knees.

 

_What the fuck is Patrick doing here?_

 

After everything that happened Nathan couldn’t imagine he would come back round here, that he would risk even passing through. The implications of seeing him twice are not lost on Nathan—he is back, for whatever reason, and Nathan has a sinking feeling it isn’t just for a visit.

 

He can’t think about it. For the love of _Jesus_ , he has to _stop thinking about it_ , not just because of Kelly, but because his sanity depends on it. It’s been years, years of bravado and big words and jumping off things and taking the piss and there is a reason for it, a reason for it all. He lives to forget, and he is awfully damn good at it.

 

\-- 

 

_Nathan wakes up, but it’s too much. He closes his eyes._

_Nathan wakes up again. Nathan tries to pretend it hasn’t happened, tries to ignore the throbbing in places he has never felt throbs before, ignore the vulnerable, curling pit of his stomach and the sharp stabs of pain that slice through his head every time he moves. He is so sore and bruised that it takes him too long to sit up, too long to see the blood on the sheets, on the comforter, crusted and drying down his legs._

_He doesn’t cry. He stares at his battered body for a long time and feels a lot of things—furious, scared, ashamed, overwhelmed—but he can’t muster a single tear. It occurs to him, idly, that there is something wrong with him, something different, something on an inside part of him that he never knew existed. It is broken. He is broken._

_It’s a Saturday, or at least he figures it must be because all of a sudden the smell of pancakes is wafting through his room. He hears footsteps and whips his head toward the door, nearly crying out at the resulting pain._

_He collects himself. He has to. “Don’t come in.”_

_The words come out in a barely audible croak._

_“Nathan?”_

_It’s his mother. He feels his lips start to quiver at the sound of her voice. It is an indescribable relief that she is here, and yet he feels this twisted, undeserved hatred toward her. She let this happen to him. She let this strange man into their home and she wasn’t here to keep him safe._

_But is it her fault? Is it her fault, really … or is it **his?**_

 

_“Nathan, I’m making pancakes.”_

_“Don’t come in,” he says, louder this time. “I’m sick.”_

_“You sound it. I’ll bring round some tea,” she says, and then he hears the doorknob rattling._

_It feels like he is ripping through the fibers of every muscle in his body with the effort it takes to rip the comforter over his head and hide under his blankets. He bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste metallic, fresh blood spurt into his mouth. He thinks he might retch but he forces himself to stay still._

_His mother doesn’t speak for a moment. His heartbeat is so loud that surely she will hear it. He wonders how dark it is in the room, if there’s any blood on the top of the comforter, if she’ll even notice if there is._

_“You’re not going to get up at all, then?” his mother asks, sounding worried._

_He lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. He should tell her that he’s fine, that he’ll be out in a minute. He should just get up, shake off everything that happened last night and scrub himself clean in the shower, let it all swirl down the drain and never think about it again. This isn’t her fault. It’s his._

_He opens his mouth full of good intentions, but all that comes out is a black-hearted, wretched, “Get out.”_

_He doesn’t hear anything, so he knows she hasn’t moved. “Nathan,” she says, her voice a mix of admonishment and concern._

 

_“You heard me.” He feels dark and ugly and bruised. He feels **bad** , like a **bad person**. He squeezes his eyes shut and hopes that she hurts. “Get **out**.”_

 

_Still no sound._

 

_“Get **out** of my room,” he yells, “get **out** , **get** out, get **out** —_”

 

_The door clicks shut and he is alone. He lays there for a moment, stunned, breathing heavily under the soiled blankets. Slowly he curls himself into a ball, sliding his hands under the crooks of his knees and drawing his aching legs up to his chest. His throat constricts and the tears burst unexpectedly, silent and breathless._

_He wanted her to leave. He just didn’t think she would._

 

\-- 

 

It feels like someone is watching him.

 

Nathan knows he is being absurd. Nobody is watching him. They’re all trudging back to the community center together; Alisha and Curtis seem to have made up, loosely united once more by their mutual annoyance at Nathan, and Kelly is walking ahead while Simon, as always, walks a few steps behind.

 

Once it’s time for everybody to head out for the night, not one of them says good-bye to him, except Simon, and Nathan doubts if that even counts. He makes a face at Simon that he ignores and Nathan feels a little bit bad about it once he hears the locker room door shut behind him.

 

Nathan raises his arms up and stretches, listening to the popping of his joints cracking. He reaches to grab the bit of money he has stashed in his locker just in case he can’t trick the vending machine and is about to slam the locker door shut when something happens to him.

 

He can’t move.

 

At first he thinks maybe it’s some sort of muscle spasm or that he’s imagining it. But then a few long, deliberate seconds pass and Nathan literally is rooted to the spot, unable to move anything, it seems, but his eyes.

 

His first instinct is to yell. Maybe Simon hasn’t gotten too far, and Simon is better than nothing. He has this ominous, terrible idea that something is about to happen to him, something far worse than what’s already happening, and when he hears the slow steps coming from around the corner he doesn’t even have to turn his head to know who it is.

 

“Look at you, champ.”

 

The drawl of Patrick’s voice makes his chest seize with panic. He has kept his uneasiness of seeing the man at bay by assuring himself that he’s taller, stronger, older than the last time they met, but never in the thousands of years he is doomed to live could he have imagined _this_.

 

Patrick takes a few steps closer. Nathan can see his outline in the periphery, can hear his familiar predatory breaths.

 

“All grown up, now, aren’t you?”

 

Nathan wants to wheel around and sock him, wants to hit him and kick him until he bleeds, until there is nothing left of him. He wants to see terror in the other man’s eyes, true terror, as the life is sucked out of him and he is finished on the floor. Nathan could _kill_ him. He could.

 

But there is nothing, not so much as a creak in his bones or a sound in his throat.

 

Now he can see Patrick, who has inserted himself directly in Nathan’s line of vision. He is older. Dirtier. There are wrinkles on the sides of his mouth and eyes that would make anyone else look kindly but only serve to make him look grimy and hardened.

 

“Don’t worry, Nathan. I forgive you for what you did. You were only a boy, after all.”

 

Nathan tries not to look at him. His eyes can move, and that is the only shred of mercy in this situation. He stares as hard as he can to his left, until the sockets feel like they might snap.

 

“Look at me.”

 

Never.

 

“I said … _look at me_.”

 

Nathan doesn’t need to be able to see it to recognize the cold, unforgivable slip of a knife against his skin. It’s resting against his neck and the pressure is deepening. Nathan doesn’t know where his important veins are, but he’s guessing by the confidence in Patrick’s grip that he sure does.

 

Nathan doesn’t look. Let Patrick kill him. Let Patrick think he’s dead and never come back.

 

The pressure of the knife mounts until Nathan can feel his skin pricking, sure that there is a thin line of blood already forming. It won’t be quick, but it will be over. He steels himself and waits for the slash that will kill him.

 

It doesn’t come. Patrick draws the knife back with a throaty laugh. “Same old Nathan,” he says, the words slimy on his tongue. The knife clatters to the floor, and so does Nathan’s last chance of escaping whatever is about to happen to him.

 

“You’ve always been … pretty,” says Patrick idly. “You used to look like a little china doll, you know. I remember the first time I met you.”

 

His hand cups Nathan’s chin, squeezing it possessively. He draws his face closer in and seems to inspect Nathan, the pores of his skin and the bridge of his nose and back to the blacks of his irises. His touch feels vile. It’s different from before, now that all this time has passed—Nathan is old enough to feel hatred, has had eight years of it seeping into every crack in his bones, and he feels the murderous heat of it rising uselessly in his lungs.

 

“How innocent, how sweet you looked. Like a fallen angel.”

 

The shame twists in Nathan’s gut sharper than any knife ever could. He doesn’t want to hear this. He can’t hear this. He doesn’t want to remember that everything is his fault.

 

“You’re different now.” He hears the intake of breath and the noise of Patrick’s tongue slithering over his lips. “But so am I.”

 

_No._ The word is screaming through his every limb, screaming for release, for escape, for salvation, and just as if he willed it he suddenly feels himself rip free from whatever power is binding him. He staggers in surprise and screams, and that’s all he has the time to do before he’s on the floor and frozen again.

 

Patrick is standing over him, kneeling down, his grin wolfish. Nathan is petrified. Once his eyes lock on he can’t look away.

 

_No. No, no, no, no_ —

 

He hears the rip of unzipped jeans, and calloused, wandering hands crawling on his skin. His eyes can’t close. Whatever this state of being is, it has locked his eyes wide open no matter how hard he struggles not to see. He picks a spot on the ceiling and stares and endures. 

 

\--

_The fourth time it happens, Nathan runs away from home and finds the first phone he can to call collect. He is so relieved when the call is accepted that he almost sinks to his knees._

 

_“Hey, Dad.” Nathan presses the phone to his ear, to his cheek, to the curve of his chin, desperate to hear the other man’s voice. For a moment there is nothing. “It’s Nathan,” he says, hoping he doesn’t sound as pathetic as he feels._

 

_“I figured.”_

 

_Nathan winces, and feels his bottom lip start to quiver. He’s going to say no. Worst of all, he’s going to say no, and Nathan’s going to cry like some insufferable pussy on the side of the road._

 

_“Well? What is it, then?”_

 

_He takes a breath, trying to calm himself, trying to stop his heart from beating like a wild animal trapped in a cage. “I’m sorry,” he says, stammering, “I’m sorry, I know you’re—you’re busy, but could I—Jesus,” he says, because he’s furious with himself for sounding this stupid and needy. He presses his forehead against the glass of the payphone station and squeezes his eyes shut, trying to gain some semblance of control over himself._

 

_“Nathan.” His father’s voice is tired and disappointed. “What have you done now?”_

 

_“I haven’t—I haven’t done anything,” Nathan stammers, his indignation beating out his fear. “What are you—no, **Dad** , I haven’t done anything wrong, for fuck’s sake, why is that the first thing you—”_

 

_“I’m going to hang up—”_

_“ **Wait** ,” Nathan bursts, the word mangled and entirely too loud. “Wait, **please**.”_

 

_He hears his father sigh on the other end._

 

_“I just—” His eyes are filling with hot, frustrated tears, and he has to clench his entire body to stop them from choking up his voice. “I just—Mum’s got this new boyfriend, and I—I really, we just don’t …” He can’t tell his father, of course he can’t. He would never look at him the same. “Can I stay at your place for a while?” he asks. “Please,” he adds for good measure._

 

_“Nathan …”_

 

_“Please,” Nathan bursts again, “just for a bit, I promise, I’ll stay out of the way, I’ll be good.” He sucks in a quivering breath, clutching the phone like a lifeline. “I’ll be good.”_

 

_It takes his father a moment to respond. “You need to work things out with your mum. Give it a few weeks—”_

 

_“Dad,” Nathan pleads. “Dad, please.”_

 

_“Are you—where are you right now? Is there something going on?” his father asks._

 

_Nathan could tell him everything right now, and make this all go away. Tell him about Patrick’s secret visits to his bedroom, about the supposedly friendly outings that leave him screaming in Patrick’s backseat, about the cruel, crawling hands that know every inch of him, that have stained him and made him ugly forever._

 

_The only thing more powerful than his fear is his all-consuming, inescapable shame. Something is wrong with him. Something made Patrick want to treat him the way that he does._

 

_“Just let me stay for a little while,” says Nathan._

 

_He’s afraid his father will continue to pry, but he doesn’t. If there’s one thing he can count on, it’s his father avoiding conflict at all costs._

 

_“For the weekend, then. Only if it’s alright by your mum.”_

 

_“Thank you,” says Nathan. It’s not nearly enough, it’s not what he hoped for, but it’s something. It’s forty-eight hours of safety, of sleeping through the night and not looking up to Patrick’s unwelcome, poisonous stare._

 

_“Don’t make me regret it.”_

 

\-- 

 

“This is so fucked up. Look at all the blood.”

 

“How long do you s’pose he’s been dead?”

 

“Who the fuck would _do_ this?”

 

“Oh, c’mon, it’s Nathan. Who wouldn’t.”

 

“That’s not _funny_.”

 

“She’s got a point, whoever did this to him could be crawling around this place, and the rest of us aren’t immortal—”

 

“He’s waking up.”

 

Nathan blinks. All of their ragged little crew is staring down at him from what he supposes is one of the showers—at the very least, that’s the last place he remembers being before Patrick slammed him so hard his neck broke. Simon is perched directly over him, his eyes wide and entirely too close, and Kelly isn’t far behind.

 

“Now _that,_ ” Nathan groans, “is not a face I fancy waking up to.”

Simon backs up, looking self-conscious, staring at the space around Nathan where he assumes there is puddle of drying blood. Nathan blinks again, wondering if he can get up yet, wondering if Patrick’s powers are permanent even in death. He gingerly moves his shoulder—pain skyrockets through the joint, but it moves, and he exhales in relief.

 

“’ow did this _‘appen_ to you?” Kelly demands.

 

Nathan shuts his eyes. “Honestly don’t know,” he says, because this, right here and right now, is _not_ the place to start thinking about it.

 

Kelly purses her lips. She already knows. He isn’t sure what his immediate thoughts were when he first woke up, but by the expression on her face, the way her cheeks looked pinched with pity and she can’t tear her eyes off of him, she heard them all too well.

 

“Well? What’s for breakfast around here? Or have I missed it already,” says Nathan conversationally, trying to lift himself up off the floor less than successfully.

 

Curtis moves forward to help Nathan steady himself but Simon beats him to it, his hand on the back of Nathan’s neck. Nathan doesn’t anticipate his body flinching the way it does at Simon’s touch—the shiver runs down his body like a whip and everybody simultaneously backs up from him in surprise.

 

“Nathan …”

 

Kelly’s expression is some mixture of horror and concern and he can’t bear to look at it a second longer. He tears his eyes off of her, but there is nowhere safe to look, because all four of them are staring down at him now. He hazards a look down at his body. He is mostly naked, save for the bloodied boxers Patrick must have replaced after murdering him. There are claw marks on his chest that probably match the ones Nathan is pretty sure are on his back; there are bruises in various shades of purple, yellow and blue that trail from his thighs to as far up as he can see on his chest.

 

“Jesus, Nathan.” Even Alisha looks stunned and he can count on one finger the number of times he has successfully elicited pity out of her. Her eyes are lingering on the blood on his boxers, and Nathan finally summons it in him to scramble into a sitting position.

 

“Are we all enjoying the show?” he asks caustically, his entire face twisting against his will. He tries to scowl but he’s afraid there are parts of him quivering and they need to get out, now. “I mean Jesus,” he continues, trying to keep his voice even, “give an undead guy some room to fucking _breathe_.”

 

Everyone moves back except Simon. “You have to tell us who did this to you,” he says gravely.

 

“I don’t fucking know, now get out of my face, you twat,” Nathan snaps. He cringes as he tries to gain his footing. Nobody helps him this time, but he still feels their eyes on him. His face is hot with shame. They can’t see him like this. He is afraid they will take one look at him and see it written all over him, know exactly what a horrible, depraved, disgusting excuse for a human he is, that he attracts people like Patrick who do things like this to him.

 

“Well?” he says once he’s on his feet. “I don’t know what the rest of you losers are up to today, but I’m going to be taking a nice long shower and a well-deserved wank. Nothing like a little date with _these_ five lovely ladies,” he says, wagging his fingers, “to remind you how great it is to be _alive!_ ”

 

He turns his back on them and instantly feels his face starting to crumple. He just has to take a few more steps before he makes it to the showers and he can draw the curtains and separate himself, but it doesn’t solve the matter of Kelly, who is undoubtedly prying into his thoughts whether or not his back is turned to them. He tries to think of dirty lyrics, to summon anything offensive or boring enough for him to leave her alone, but all he can conjure are the words he remembers throwing at his mother all those years ago: _get out, get out, GET OUT, GETOUTGETOUTGETOUT—_

Nobody is more shocked than Nathan when Kelly cries out like she’s been cuffed across the face. He wheels around to see her clutching her head, staring at him with wide eyes. “For _fuck’s sake_ ,” she gasps. “Alright, I’m leaving. _Jesus_.”

 

He stands there for a moment, stunned. They all start retreating, looking wary. Curtis nudges Kelly to leave, and Alisha and Simon start to follow, Simon casting him one last unconvinced glance.

 

“I—I’m sorry,” he says, but he’s sure she can’t hear him. They all disappear from view behind a row of lockers. “I’m sorry,” he says, louder this time.

 

Nobody replies. Nathan holds a hand to his forehead, dragging it wearily down his face. His eyes and lips feel thick and heavy, like they don’t belong to him. Everything aches. The feelings are all too familiar—the intense, unspeakable humiliation, the hopelessness, the hurt.

 

He draws the shower curtain closed and turns on the water, cranking it up the hottest it will go. He lets it beat against his back, lets it make his skin raw and burned. He doesn’t care what happens to him anymore, and why should he?

 

And that’s when it hits him—why it’s so different this time. Why everything is magnified, why he can’t stop shaking, why he feels like he could spend hours in this shower without recovering enough to face everyone.

 

It’s not just that he has to live with this for the rest of his life. Now he’s going to live with this _forever_.

 

 

\-- 

 

_The weekend with his father passes all too quickly. Nathan can’t remember much of what they said or did with each other; there was a lot of watching sports together and errand running and watching his father work. Nathan holds true to his promise and behaves. It takes all of his mental energies to keep his mouth shut, but the promise of a warm couch where he knows nobody is going to wake him up to Patrick’s alcohol-rank wheezing is more than enough incentive._

 

_“You’ve been awfully quiet this whole weekend,” says his father._

 

_It’s Sunday afternoon and Nathan dreaded waking up this morning. He’ll have to go back home tonight, and the thought of it fills him with so much anxiety that he can’t even acknowledge it. He has been perched on the couch, his head against the armrest, curled into a self-sustained ball for most of the morning, watching as the minutes on the television clock all too quickly._

 

_Nathan glances up at his father. It takes him a second to register what he said, because he wasn’t expecting the man to say anything to him. “I guess,” he says distantly, staring back at the television, shifting his weight on the couch._

 

_For a moment he thinks his father might say something else. Ten minutes pass in silence and Nathan is fairly confident he won’t—he knows his father only cares about him enough to make a big show out of letting him stay with him once a year or so, and other than that he can’t be bothered._

 

_So Nathan isn’t expecting it when his father adds, long after their initial interaction, “There’s nothing going on, right?”_

 

_Nathan looks at him cautiously. He feels the tips of his ears burning. There’s no way his father could know, but he can’t help but ask, “What do you mean?”_

_His father isn’t looking at him. Neither of them are particularly good at talking to each other. “You know. With your mum.”_

_Nathan feels a lump forming in his throat. It isn’t the first time he has felt a confession threatening to burst off his tongue. He imagines the momentary relief from this burden, if he told the truth right now—no more nights laying awake and petrified, no more bruises and aches and scratches he can’t explain, no more of Patrick, inside and outside, asleep and awake._

_But then he imagines what happens after: a lifetime of living with his father knowing that he is weak. That he let this happen to him. Patrick has been telling Nathan that he wants it, that he’s been begging for it, that he deserves it, and Nathan doesn’t believe it, or at least he knows he shouldn’t. But it’s hard to separate himself from Patrick’s words when every waking moment seems to revolve around him now._

_Nathan decides on a half-truth. “I hate mum’s new boyfriend.”_

 

_His father nods gruffly. “You hated the last one, too, didn’t you?”_

 

_Nathan feels his fists clench. “No, Dad,” he says, his voice quiet. “I **really** hate this one.”_

 

_He keeps waiting for his father to turn his head and acknowledge him, but he doesn’t. Something is happening with the game on the television and the man’s eyes are rapt with attention, watching a play and clearly tuning Nathan out. Nathan turns his gaze back to the floor, curling into himself again, letting himself soak up his own misery on the comfortable couch. He has three hours before his mum comes to get him._

 

_“Where are you going?”_

 

_Nathan didn’t think his father would even notice when he got up. “Have to piss,” he mumbles, and ordinarily his father would raise an eyebrow and keep watch on him down the hall to make sure didn’t go some place else in the flat, but Nathan has been just well-behaved enough for him to forget his suspicion._

 

_Nathan is counting on this. He feels like he is walking in a dream, and it isn’t until he is climbing up on a chair and reaching for the top shelf of his father’s closet that he is even fully aware of what he is doing. He unzips a large black bag and lays it out on the floor, momentarily paralyzed by the magnitude of what he has just done._

 

_It’s only a handgun. Nathan doubts if it’s even loaded. He decides not to take any chances, tucking it back into its case before he zips it into the bottom of his suitcase under his clothes and books and toiletries._

_He doesn’t know why he is taking it, or what he plans to do with it. He knows he can’t shoot Patrick. He doesn’t even know how to load the damn thing. But he can’t help but feel safer with it tucked in his bag, its mere presence pacifying him in a way that nothing else has in the past few weeks. He has a back-up plan, a safety net. It is comforting to know that if he ever gets desperate enough to use it, it will be there, silent, deadly, waiting for him._

 

_His father doesn’t ask about home or his mum or Patrick the rest of the day. Nathan considers asking him to stay longer, but he knows his father doesn’t want him any longer than this and he doesn’t want to hurt his chances at getting to stay another time. He gives his father a stiff hug good-bye and his mother remarks about how grown-up he seems, so polite and mature and well-spoken, but Nathan isn’t listening to her, clutching the bulge of the handgun in his bag and dreaming about it the entire ride home._

 

\-- 

 

 

Nathan never joins the rest of the group for community service that day. He knows it means he’ll have to make up a day of it after the fact, with some other group of people that he doesn’t know, but the idea of that isn’t so bad. Strangers. Quiet. Nothing messy shared between them.

 

He listens to them come back from wherever they spent the day. He hears locker door slams and shoes squeaking and heavy, tired sighs. He is sitting in the shower and has been for a long time—apparently longer than he thought, if they’re back already. He hasn’t even bothered to find clothes. His toes and fingers are white from cold.

 

He rests his head back on the tiled wall, shutting his eyes, waiting until they leave. He has nowhere else to go, no place to be.

 

“Hey.”

 

He feels the gasp rip up his lungs and into his throat, visceral and strained. Someone is standing outside the shower stall. It takes his brain a few moments to process that the voice belongs to Simon.

 

For a moment Nathan considers ignoring him. Pretending that he isn’t here. But it’s been a long day and even Simon is better company than being alone.

 

“What?”

 

“I, uh. I thought you might need some clothes. Since yours are all bloody.”

 

Nathan feels an unfamiliar pang of gratitude. It’s been a long time since anyone has done him any favors.

 

“Well,” says Nathan, cocking his head toward Simon’s voice. “Hand them over, then, I haven’t got all day.”

 

He hears some rustling as the curtain opens.

 

“Jesus, I’m naked, you pervert,” Nathan exclaims, even though he doesn’t care in the least.

 

Predictably Simon’s eyes bulge in embarrassment before he snaps his head away, the clothes still outstretched. “Sorry,” he mumbles.

 

Nathan snatches the clothes from him. They’re several sizes too big, so they must belong to Simon. He considers making his usual brand of small talk—calling Simon a fat cow or making a lewd comment about how easy it was to get into a virgin’s pants—but he’s tired and cold and even mortifying Simon isn’t near enough of a reward to revive him.

 

Gingerly he shoves his arms through the sleeves of a t-shirt. The intensity of the bruising peaked at some point today and the swelling and the color has gradually been going down ever since, but it’s still fairly painful. There’s a clean pair of boxers. He doesn’t ask where they came from or who they belong to, because they smell like laundry detergent and Nathan’s standards are usually a lot lower than that. He finally manages to get himself up to his feet to shove his legs into the holes of the jeans and stands there for a moment while his head spins.

 

“You want to go somewhere?” Simon asks.

 

Nathan grimaces. “How cute. You asking me out, Barry?”

 

“I thought you might be hungry.”

 

“And broke,” Nathan adds. “If you buy me dinner I can’t promise I’ll make it worth your while. I’m not as easily bought as the rest of your whores.”

 

Nathan emerges form the shower stall. Simon is staring at him, his eyes lingering on a bruise on Nathan’s cheek. The blatant way he’s staring and the unfamiliar posture of his normally tightly-wound shoulders throws Nathan off guard for a moment. They stand there alone in the locker room for just a beat too long.

 

When Simon opens his mouth, Nathan is sure he’s going to ask what happened to him, but he doesn’t. “Pizza, then,” he says instead.

 

Two slices of pizza and three beers later Nathan finds himself stumbling back to the community center with Simon. He’s buzzed, but not quite drunk. Enough beers to think that maybe Simon isn’t such a bad guy and maybe every now and then he can be a _little_ bit funny, but not drunk enough to buy best friends bracelets and book a flight to Vegas together.  

 

“Let’s go to a _club_ ,” Nathan proposes instead. He’s feeling generous. He’s feeling invincible. “I know for a _fact_ you haven’t gotten laid once in this millennium, and Fido here,” says Nathan, gesturing toward his crotch, “well, he hasn’t been out for a walk all week—”

 

“You really want to get laid tonight?” asks Simon.

 

Nathan stops walking. They’re close to the water now, by one of the docks. He leans lazily against one of the posts and says, “I’m breathing, aren’t I?”

 

Simon shuffles in that way he normally does and shrugs. “I just thought … after last night …”

 

Nathan looks away from him, out toward the water. It’s dark and the light from a street lamp glimmers in the ripples. “Dying’s never stopped me before, mate.”

 

Simon doesn’t say anything. Nathan glances back over at him, because suddenly the beer blanket isn’t preventing the slight shiver that runs up his spine and the unshakeable thought that maybe Simon knows more than he’s letting on. But Simon’s just staring in that same ominous way he usually does.

 

“What?” asks Nathan, feeling riled up all of a sudden. “What are you looking at?”

 

Simon ducks his head down and lowers his voice. “I think I know what happened to you last night.”

 

Nathan’s head snaps up. Before he consciously can think about what he’s doing he takes a few large, threatening steps forward, thinking that Simon will back up in alarm, but he doesn’t, and it only makes Nathan feel even more hostile toward him.

 

“What are you saying,” Nathan demands. It’s so cold that he can see his own breath in the air, blowing right into Simon’s face. Simon doesn’t even flinch and it makes Nathan want to do something that will shock him, that will hurt him. He has this sudden impression that Simon is smug in his knowledge of what happened, and he hears Curtis words from this morning: _Oh, c’mon, it’s Nathan. Who wouldn’t._

 

They all wanted this to happen to him, Simon included. Nathan feels white hot fury flashing through his limbs. He wants to rattle Simon, wants to wipe that all-knowing, calm expression off his face, wants to prove that he is _better_ than this, whatever it is Simon is assuming about him, but his knees are starting to quiver and he can’t keep his features steady and all that comes out is, “So what, then? You went ahead and watched last night, did you?”

 

“What?” This is what finally makes Simon’s eyebrows furrow, his nostrils flare. It’s the reaction Nathan was hoping for and for a moment he relishes in it, in winding Simon up. “No, I—of _course_ not—”

 

“I bet you watched it and had yourself a good laugh, didn’t you?” says Nathan, aware that something deep and unstable in his chest is making his voice quiver. He needs to back up, he needs to stop himself, but something in him has cracked and he feels like he is a human avalanche and can’t be stopped. “You sick _fuck_ ,” he continues, getting louder, “with your _fucking_ invisible shit, I bet you sat there all bloody night and enjoyed it, wanked off to it, did you—”

  
“No—Nathan, I wouldn’t, I didn’t—”

 

“ _Fuck off!_ ” Nathan screams, because Simon has reached forward to put a hand on his shoulder or something, Nathan doesn’t want to know and he won’t have to because he has started inexplicably flailing his arms in front of himself, prompting Simon to back up even further.

 

Nathan stops in his tracks, taking a few ragged, chest-rattling breaths. He has no idea how this escalated so quickly. He is starting to feel dizzy again, and maybe it’s just the beer, but he suddenly feels nauseous, sick to his core.

 

“Nathan,” says Simon carefully. “I swear. Whatever you think I saw, I didn’t.”

 

Nathan snorts, trying to think of something to say, not thinking fast enough.

 

“I just thought—between how we found you this morning, and the way Kelly reacted when she tried to read your thoughts—”

 

He can’t hear this. He turns his heel abruptly and starts walking away, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets and ducking his head down against the wind.

 

“Where are you going?” asks Simon, struggling to keep up with him.

 

“Nowhere,” Nathan snaps. “None of your _business_. Get lost, Barry.”

 

“I didn’t mean to upset you—”

 

“Great fucking job, then,” Nathan spits, stopping so unexpectedly that Simon trips on the back of his heels. Nathan doesn’t know what makes him do it, but he pushes both his arms out and shoves Simon, shoves him so hard that he falls backwards and lands on his rear end with a thud.

 

He stands there for a second, surprised at himself, waiting to see if Simon gets up. Simon cringes and scrambles to his feet, but doesn’t make any attempt to get closer to Nathan. Nathan should apologize. He didn’t mean it, and he may be a dick, but he’s not the kind of dick that goes shoving people down in the middle of the street at night. He’s not like this. He’s not like Patrick.

 

The apology dies on his lips though, and he turns just as abruptly as he did the first time and starts to walk away. He keeps walking and doesn’t hear Simon, not for at least fifty paces, but he doesn’t want to turn back until he is sure the other boy hasn’t followed.

 

Once he rounds the corner he hazards a glance over his shoulder. The street is empty and Simon is gone. Nathan finds a bench to sit on and buries his head in his hands, wrings his fingers through his matted hair.

 

Maybe he does deserve what happened, maybe he deserves every bit of it. He is rotten. He is bad, and he always has been.

 

Nathan shudders and untangles his hands from his hair. He can’t sit here and think about it any longer. He has to go back to the community center, has to pretend like none of this has happened. Patrick thinks he is dead, and that is the most merciful thing that has come out of this mess. For the first time since all this crazy powers stuff began, he knows that the community center, the scene of the crime, is the safest place he can be.

 

\-- 

 

_By the time Nathan is staring into the barrel of his father’s gun, he has lost count of how many times Patrick has hurt him. He knows it’s been six months since Patrick and his mother started dating, which seems to be just enough time for his mother to feel comfortable asking Patrick to move in, and just enough time for Nathan to decide he can’t go on living like this one moment more._

_Nathan doesn’t think it will really happen, but the moving truck comes that morning, and all of Patrick’s things with it. He is so stunned and betrayed by the idea of his mother letting Patrick into their home that for a long time he sits in his room, shut behind the closet door, trying not to hyperventilate in the dark. The tears come unexpectedly after a few hours of this, the way they always do, fat and hot and demeaning. He is powerless. He can’t tell anyone, he can’t even bear to admit it to himself, and if it happens one more time, he will **break**._

_And that’s when Nathan remembers. The contingency plan. The solution. The gun he tucked away and long since forgot about, hidden under the mattress in a box that used to hold his dress shoes._

 

_He rises out of the closet slowly. The house is quiet; Nathan knows that his mother left for the grocery store a while ago, and Patrick went with her. He takes a few deliberate steps toward his bedroom door. The lock is broken, and has been broken since Patrick toyed with it some months ago, but it makes Nathan feel better to twist it shut. It won’t matter, of course. Lock or no lock, by the time they get home, Nathan will already be dead._

 

_It takes him longer than he anticipated to figure out how to load it. It feels a little absurd and against the sobriety of the whole affair to check YouTube for a how-to video, but he needs to be certain. He’s only going to go through the torment of this once._

_Once he is satisfied that everything is in order, he takes in one last sweep of his bedroom. He wonders if he should leave some sort of note, but decides not to. What could he say? If he can’t admit to everything while he’s alive, why bother in death? And besides, he hasn’t any real friends at school, nobody who will miss him enough to expect to be mentioned in a suicide note._

 

_He should pick a good place to do this. He hates to think about the mess it will leave for his mother, and that’s the thought that makes him smile despite himself. In the end he decides for the middle of the room, on the shag rug that he’s had ever since he can remember. It’s one of the few places Patrick never threw him down on, one of the few things in the room that Nathan really feels still belongs to him._

 

_It feels oddly formal, pressing a gun up to his neck. He should be feeling something. Sadness. Nostalgia. **Anything**. But all he feels is relief._

 

_Nathan has never been one to hesitate. He sucks in his last breath and shuts his eyes._

 

_“ **Nathan**.”_

_His mother is standing in the doorway, groceries spilling from her arms, tears already springing into her wide, disbelieving eyes._

 

_He wasn’t expecting this, but it doesn’t change a thing._

 

_“Nathan,” his mother says, her voice practically a moan, guttural and deep. “Nathan, baby, please.”_

 

_His eyes are blurry with tears. He always hates to see her cry, has always felt her sadness and known he was at least partly to blame. Not anymore, though._

 

_“Oh, God.” She is paralyzed, her hands outstretched, afraid to come too close. “Please. Please, don’t, **please**.”_

 

_Nathan swallows hard, his throat thick with mucus. Facing her is so much harder than he could ever have imagined. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, and he sees his mother’s features shift—she thinks that he’s apologizing and putting the gun down, apologizing because he doesn’t mean it. She’s wrong._

 

_In rapid succession he pinches his eyes shut again, hears his mother scream his name, and pulls the trigger._

 

_Silence. It takes a moment for Nathan to realize that it hasn’t worked, and when he does, he immediately pulls the trigger again. “No,” he says under his breath. He sets the gun down on the floor and the room starts spinning. He failed._

 

_His mother crashes into him then, clutching at him, smothering him with her body and her sadness. She sobs into his hair, tells him she loves him, tells him she’s sorry, even though he knows she has no idea what to be sorry for. He sits there, completely numb, letting her cry._

 

_In the doorway he senses a shadow. He looks up and sees Patrick, standing over them with his unsettling stare, gaze shifting between Nathan and his mother and the gun on the floor. Nathan looks away and by the time he looks back, Patrick is gone._

 

_“Please, Nathan, please,” his mother is saying, beyond sense, beyond words. She pulls back and cups his cheeks in her hands. “Don’t ever—oh, **God** , Nathan, please.” They’re both crying, their faces red and wet with tears. He doesn’t want to be here, not on this earth at all, and certainly not in his mother’s arms and taking love that he doesn’t deserve. She runs her hands through his hair in a way she hasn’t done since he was a little kid, touching his cheeks, his nose, his ears._

 

_“You’re okay,” she tells him, drawing him so close and wrapping her arms around his skinny body so tight that he can’t breathe. “You’re okay, I’ve got you, you’re okay.”_

_He would give anything in that moment to believe her._

 

\-- 

 

Nathan sleeps fitfully that night. He knows the difference between nightmares and reality, in fact spent years training his body to distinguish between the two, but unfortunately has no insight on how to wake himself up. So while he can relive choppy, muddled versions of the past and know that they aren’t real, he has no way to control it, to escape it.

 

He watches the sunrise peek through the windows from his makeshift bed. He has done this almost a hundred times since his mother kicked him out, in relative silence and solitude, so he can’t help his shock when he hears a voice boom, “What the fuck are you doing up there?”

 

Nathan starts, nearly knocking last night’s pizza over the guardrail. It’s the probation worker. _Fuck_.

 

“Got here early, fancied a nap,” he says casually. He scrunches his nose at the probation worker and says, “It’s not nine o’clock yet, did your prostitute kick you out of her flat?”

 

The other man raises his eyebrows at him as he starts climbing the stairs. Shit, shit, shit. He’ll see everything—the makeshift mattress, the toiletries, the candy wrappers, the cell phone charger plugged into the wall. In the few moments it takes for him to climb, Nathan scrambles to his feet, trying to block the extent of it with his body. It occurs to him that he’s wearing nothing but his boxers and a t-shirt, that there are gruesome uncovered bruises exposed on his arms and legs, but the probation worker doesn’t even notice. He surveys the area with a critical eye, his lip half-raised in a snarl.

 

“You’re living in the community center.”

 

Nathan rolls his eyes. “Like I’d _live_ in this shithole.”

 

The probation worker gives Nathan one of those hard, “don’t-fuck-with-me, I’m-an-adult” expressions.

 

“If I come up here tonight and I see you or any of your things still here, I will call the police. Understood?”

 

He’s smirking at Nathan. It’s all very funny to him. Nathan feels that dark, black, ugly part of him crawling in his stomach, wanting to wipe the smirk right off of his face. His fingers curl into fists and for a moment he stops breathing, trying to collect himself.

 

Nathan rolls his neck, trying to relax. He hears his bones crack.

 

“Fine.”

 

\-- 

 

_After the suicide attempt, his mother puts him in a psychiatric facility. She waits an entire day, never letting him leave her sight, even sending Patrick away for the night. They eat, and watch television, the silence only interrupted by his mother’s occasional crying. A few times she tries to ask him something, but his face is hard and expressionless and they both know he isn’t going to answer._

 

_Nathan doesn’t argue when she hustles him into the car the next morning, trying to reassure him, promising him she isn’t going to leave him alone. He already has an idea of where they’re going. He heard his mother talking on the phone with his father last night, when she thought he was asleep on the couch._

 

_He should feel embarrassed. He should feel ashamed. But he doesn’t feel anything at all._

 

_The next few days are a haze of drugs and therapists and lying on a bed in a cheery pink room. He’s in a children’s ward, planted between a loud schizophrenic and some girl who keeps pulling her hair out. He ignores them. He ignores everybody._

 

_His father actually shows up. The surprise punctuates the listless days, and for a moment there is such an overwhelming, indescribable swell of emotion in his chest that he thinks he might burst. But just as soon as he hears his father talking outside the hall, he knows he can’t face him. He shuts his eyes and pretends to be sleeping._

 

_After a few minutes he hears the door to the room creak open softly, and feels the shadow of his father standing over his bed. Nathan reminds himself to breathe, wondering how long this will last. He is unused to his father paying him any sort of attention, let alone this unfamiliar, oddly intimate kind of attention that he is paying now, when he thinks Nathan is asleep._

 

_A long bit of time passes. Nathan doesn’t know whether or not he should open his eyes, whether or not his father has left the room. Just when he is reasonably sure that he must have left by now, he feels the weight of his father’s rough, calloused hand against the skin of his forehead, smoothing back the curls in his face._

 

_His hand stays there. Nathan reminds himself to breathe. In twelve years of wondering it is the first time he has ever thought that maybe his father cares about him, that maybe Nathan is worthy, that he is loved._

 

_After his father leaves he hears his parents talking outside of his room._

 

_“Why is his eye like that? His ribs? He couldn’t have done that to himself.”_

 

_His mother mumbles something in response. He is curious, how she will try to explain it away, to herself, to his father. He wonders if she really has no idea, and he’s not sure what makes him angrier: the thought that she has known, that she has known all along, and has done nothing to stop it; or that she really has paid him so little attention that she never noticed the withdrawal and the bruises and the fear in the first place._

 

_Nathan can’t hear much because they are whispering, until he hears his father say clearly and angrily, “Louise. That isn’t schoolyard stuff. Someone **did** that to him.”_

 

_“Lower your voice,” he hears his mother say, and then the words are muffled again._

 

_Nathan doesn’t move, comfortable hiding in the darkness of his eyelids. He lays there and pretends that it worked. That he loaded the gun properly, that the bullet went off, that he is in the kind of darkness that lasts forever._

 

\-- 

 

It’s so cold. Jesus ever-fucking Christ, it’s cold. Nathan balls his hands into fists and shoves his arms up through the sleeves of his sweater, hugging himself in a pathetic attempt to keep warm. He hasn’t been out this late at night for a long time, since he’s always conscious of the fact that somebody might lock him out of the community center, and when he was out last night at least he had the buzz of a few beers to keep him warm. Now there is nothing but Nathan’s miserably inadequate hand-outs from Simon.

 

He tries to make a game out of watching his breath form little clouds in front of his mouth, but that becomes boring in about five seconds. He tries to occupy his mind and think of something that will pass the time away but all he can think of is Patrick and his leer and his hands and _no_ , no, he can’t let himself think, it’s a terrible idea, so he gets up on his feet and walks.

 

It must be a Friday or a Saturday because there are happy drunk people with big, sloppy smiles on the streets. Girls stumbling on their heels and dutiful sons-of-bitches who are getting totally laid tonight, following them and making sure they don’t face plant. Nathan lets them pass him as he shoulders the weight of both of his bags, which carry about everything he owns, minus the clothes he trashed after Patrick wrecked them.

 

He can’t go into a bar. He doesn’t have any money and they’ll kick him out; he couldn’t look more like a homeless with these fucking bags if he tried. He tries walking but he literally can’t feel his god damn toes. He stands in an alley and drops his bags in frustration. “Mother fucking cold shit _fuck_ ,” he mutters, like it’s going to make him feel any warmer to cuss out nature.

 

“Nathan?”

 

His head pops up. It’s Alisha, whose lips are decidedly not as blue as his are, who is staring at him as if he has grown two heads.

 

He rolls his eyes. “Fancy meeting you here,” he says grimly. He needs desperately to take a sniff or swipe his face with the back of his hand but he doesn’t want to call attention to the unattractive run of snot collecting under his nose. Then he remembers his odds of ever fucking Alisha are zero, and goes ahead and wipes it off with Simon’s sleeve.

 

She doesn’t seem to notice. “What are you doing out here?”

 

“’S my c-corner,” he says, his teeth rattling in his mouth. “I usually charge fifty, d-discounted rates the first time, y-you know, really reel ‘em in til they’re hooked.”

 

She rolls her eyes. “Where are you going with those bags?”

 

“Nowhere.” It’s as honest as he’s going to get.

 

“Fine, whatever. Kelly and I are hanging out in the bar across the street. I only came out for a smoke.”

 

“You gonna give me one or n-not?” he says indignantly.

 

He is surprised when she extends her hand and offers him a cigarette. He takes it without any ceremony and waits for her to light it, thinking this is the closest thing to “nice” Alisha will ever be to him. He knows it’s only because she probably feels badly for him, after they found him all bloodied up in the locker room, but he doesn’t care. It isn’t central heating but it’s a cigarette and smoke in his lungs and it’ll have to do.

 

“You were quiet today,” says Alisha.

 

Nathan raises his eyebrows. “Lucky for you. Or I might have commented on that massive wedgie you spent most of the afternoon shoving out of your arse.”

 

“You’re such a prick. Forget it,” she says, starting to leave.

 

“Wait.”

 

“What?” she asks, exasperated.

 

Their eyes meet for a second and her face softens. He has to look down at his shoes because he suddenly feels self-conscious for saying something so needy, but then again, Alisha is a girl and girls eat stuff like that up.

 

“Hey, sorry, I had to finish my—Nathan?”

 

Kelly looks at him, her eyes trailing from Nathan to the bags on at his feet and then back to Nathan again. He watches her connect the dots; she doesn’t need to read his thoughts to have some idea of what has happened. He tries not to shiver too obviously in front of her to avoid looking as pathetic and homeless as he is, but at the same time he is hoping that at least Kelly out of all of their group might be willing to cut him some slack.

 

“C’mon,” she says, cocking her head toward the bar. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

 

A grin splits on his face. His lips are so dry from the cold he thinks they might be bleeding. “ _Nice_.”

 

She points a warning finger at him. “Just this once, awright?”

 

Kelly ends up letting him come home with her that night, sneaking him up the stairs past her mother’s room and fixing him up with pillows and blankets on the floor. She doesn’t ask him any questions about what happened to him the other night, about why he’s wandering around with his bags; after all, she doesn’t have to. But she doesn’t pry or make a big to-do about feeling sorry for him, which he appreciates more than the free beer and the place to crash.

 

“Don’t wank on me or anyfing tonight. No funny business,” she says, turning off the lights.

 

“No funny business,” Nathan agrees with a salute.

 

A few minutes pass. There’s a clock happily ticking away in the corner of Kelly’s room. Now that his eyes have adjusted to the darkness he can appreciate how cozy her room is, how inviting and warm. There are pieces of her everywhere—the posters on the wall, the stuffed animals under her bed, the stacks of letters and applications and postcards on her dresser. It looks like a place someone calls home.

 

Nathan feels an ache somewhere deep in his gut. “Hey. Kelly.”

 

“Wot?” she grumbles.

 

He breathes into the blanket. It smells like cigarette smoke and detergent and Kelly. “Thanks.”

 

\-- 

 

_His father comes back again the next day, and he walks into the room so quickly that Nathan can’t pretend to be asleep. He looks agitated, shifty, and after a moment Nathan realizes that this is the first time all day that his mother hasn’t been in the room._

 

_“I brought you this.”_

 

_His father sets a book down on Nathan’s lap. It’s an old chapter book, one of some adventure series Nathan used to read a few years ago that he must have left at his father’s place on one of his visits. Nathan picks it up and flips through the frayed pages. Ordinarily he’d say something snarky, call it to his father’s attention that he’s not a little kid anymore and he hasn’t read a book like this since his mother stopped holding his hand at the crosswalk._

 

_“Thanks,” he says instead._

 

_His father sits down on the chair by Nathan’s bed. His hands are wrought and fidgeting in his lap, and something about him seems wound up. Nathan is afraid that he is angry at him. That he’s going to yell. After all, Nathan stole his gun right under his nose and hid it for months. His father jerks his head back and exhales loudly, like he’s getting ready to say something, and Nathan tries not to shrink away from him in anticipation._

 

_“I have to ask you something.”_

 

_His voice is soft and gruff and nothing like Nathan is expecting. “Sure,” he says, still holding the book, staring at the cheery, colorful cover._

 

_He doesn’t expect his father to touch his forearm. Nathan looks up at him, because the gesture is bizarre, but then he realizes that his father is staring at one of the bruises on Nathan’s arm, a ring just under his elbow where Patrick’s iron grip pinned him down a few days ago. Slowly, Nathan withdraws his arm, staring back down at the book as his heart starts to pound against his ribcage._

 

_“Nathan,” his father starts. “Did someone—has someone been hurting you?”_

 

_Nathan doesn’t answer. He can’t. It feels like his throat is swollen shut._

 

_“The bruises. Someone’s been doing this, haven’t they.”_

 

_Nathan feels hot shame flooding his cheeks, burning to the tips of his ears. He takes a breath. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say. No, he isn’t going to say anything, he can’t, he **can’t**._

 

_“Is it … is it your mum’s boyfriend?”_

 

_Nathan can’t help the infinitesimally small intake of air, and he looks up at his father, knowing his eyes are wet and glossy and giving everything away. Yes, he wants to say, and he tries, he really does. He opens his mouth and nothing comes out. It feels like drowning. He wants so badly for his father to know, for him to understand, but saying it out loud is worse than dying—there will be nothing of him left._

 

_“It is, then, isn’t it.”_

 

_It’s only then that Nathan detects the undertones in his father’s voice. The deadly, quiet rage that seems to be humming under his words. One of his eyebrows is twitching and his eyes, Nathan notices, are bloodshot and red-rimmed, like he hasn’t slept in years. Nathan has never seen his father like this, so rigid and angry, and it strikes him that his father looks almost murderous under the grim overhead lighting of the children’s ward._

 

_“Did he hit you, Nathan? Has he been hurting you?”_

 

_The words sound like they’re underwater. Slowly, his eyes undeniably filling with tears, he manages the smallest, barest of nods._

 

_A moment passes and his father hasn’t said anything. Nathan is suddenly so afraid, so desperately, gut-wrenchingly afraid that his father won’t believe him, that he hazards a glance up at him._

 

_The man’s jaw is set with enough intensity that Nathan barely recognizes him. “Why—what has he—” The anger seems to overcome him for a moment, and he says, “Why didn’t you tell someone? Where has your mother been?”_

_A fat tear rolls down his cheek and then it’s a constant stream. Nathan isn’t breathing, he can’t let himself take in a gulp of air, the deep, shuddering kind of breath that his lungs are begging for._

_“Nathan?” his father asks again._

_He has to look away from him. His vision is so blurred that he isn’t even sure where he’s looking anymore. He swallows as hard as he can, trying to suck the tears back into himself, trying to keep his voice level. “I couldn’t,” he says, and the words come out in an undignified, congested sob. “I couldn’t tell. He—he didn’t—it was **more** than—and I—”_

_He can’t say anything more, and becomes some puddle version of himself, curling his knees in to his chest and heaving big, gasping, pitiful sobs. It’s suddenly all too overwhelming to bear: the months of agony, the terror, the shame, the thought that it would **never end** and the complete and utter **failure** to do something as simple as taking his own life._

 

_“What did he do to you,” his father asks, his voice terrifyingly low._

 

_Nathan shakes his head, hiccupping through the sobs, unable to catch his breath. “I can’t,” he moans. “I can’t.”_

 

_His father slams his fist down on his own knee with a hard **thunk** and says, “ **Why** wouldn’t you—” He stops short. “You tried to tell me. **Jesus**.”_

 

_The man flies to his feet then, his expression gruesome and twisted and frightening. He looks like his mind is somewhere else, somewhere miles away from this strange room and his sobbing son. His hands are quaking at his sides. “ **Jesus** ,” he says again, and then he stalks toward the door._

 

_“Dad,” Nathan croaks._

 

_His father pauses for just a moment. Nathan doesn’t know why he wants so desperately for him to stay; he can’t possibly explain himself, he can’t even manage a coherent string of words. But for some reason when his father leaves the room without another beat of hesitation, he feels like someone has ripped his heart out of his chest._

 

_His own father can’t bear to look at him. He is disgusting, he is ruined, and ugly, and terrible, and now his father knows it, too._

 

\-- 

 

The next morning they don’t have community service. Nathan sneaks out at dawn, without waking Kelly. He knows if he gets her into trouble he won’t be able to stay with her again. He straps his bags up on his shoulders and heads to the community center—the probation worker won’t be there on a Saturday, he figures, and that aside, they can’t just kick him out in the middle of the day.

 

He spends the rest of the morning dozing in his little alcove, nodding off and waking up and not really caring what happens to him. He doesn’t let himself sleep for too long because he doesn’t want to dream about Patrick, or living forever, or the look on Kelly’s face when he screamed _get out_ one too many times and pushed her out of his brain.

 

Sometime around noon he hears footsteps approaching him. He doesn’t bother moving. If it’s the probation worker, it’s the probation worker, and it’s too late for him to hide now.

 

The footsteps stop. Nathan looks over and there’s no one there.

 

“Um.”

 

Nathan’s legs jerk from under him in surprise. “ _Fuck_ ,” he says, toward the sound of the voice, “You’re invisible, you twat, what the _fuck_.”

 

“Oh. Right.” And then Simon spontaneously appears in front of him. Nathan rolls his eyes and looks away, but not before catching the splatter of blood inked on the front of Simon’s gray jacket and jeans.

 

“Oh, Jesus. Tell me you didn’t kill another probation worker.”

 

“No.”

 

“Well?” he asks, impatient, because he knows that this can only mean he’s going to get roped into some bizarre shenanigans involving some weird fuck with a power who has pissed off someone in their group, and he’s going to have to go through the song and dance of not giving a shit before he eventually follows because he’s bored and he’s lonely and what else the fuck is there to do for an immortal boy with psychological issues the size of Mount Everest on a Saturday afternoon?

 

“I—I—” Simon blinks for a moment, like he can’t quite believe what he’s going to say. “I found the man who was following you the other day. I saw him.”

 

Nathan feels his stomach cramp painfully at the thought. “So what?” he asks, trying not to visibly panic as he realizes that if Simon has seen him, he hasn’t left town at all; that he could see Nathan walking out on the street, realize that he isn’t dead, and come back for a second round, or a third, or an _infinite_ amount.

 

“I followed him.”

 

“You _what?_ ”

 

“He was—he was busting down the door on someone’s flat. So I followed him. And I saw—what his power was.”

 

Nathan looks at Simon, his eyes narrowing, trying to size him up. The blood. The shifty way he’s moving. The blackness of his pupils, wide and staring back at Nathan. “And?” Nathan prompts.

 

“Well, I—he was going to kill someone. The man whose flat he busted into. He froze him. Like he must have done to you. But he had a knife, and—well.”

 

Nathan doesn’t know why, but he almost snorts. It’s weird to think that Patrick has other enemies, that he exists in another world outside of the one where he tortures Nathan.

 

“I killed him,” says Simon, and then he sucks his lips under his teeth, still staring at Nathan, bracing himself for a reaction. 

 

Nathan thinks maybe he will feel some wave of emotion, and he sits back and waits for it to hit. He waits for relief, for shock, for maybe even guilt or for fear. After a moment he just says, “You killed him.”

 

Simon nods, his head jerking up and down just once. He stands there for a few beats, like he’s waiting for Nathan to say something. “I thought—I just thought you should know.”

 

Nathan exhales, shutting his eyes. He knows the magnitude of this situation, the enormity of what Simon has done, is extreme. He doesn’t want to feel this inexpressible kind of gratitude, doesn’t want this debt between them that can never be repaid. He wants to scream at Simon—how could he do this, do this for _Nathan_ , and what the fuck is wrong with him that he killed a guy in the first place? For the first time in a long time, Nathan is at a complete loss for what to say. _Simon killed Patrick._

 

He looks up at Simon again, considering that maybe Simon is bullshitting him, but Simon isn’t the type and he knows it. It doesn’t make it any easier for him to understand. Why Simon would even follow Patrick in the first place, let alone follow him into someone’s flat and murder a murderer.

 

After a few moments of consideration he still doesn’t know how to feel or what to say. He gets up off the ground and dusts off his pants.

 

“Well. I s’pose you’ll need help getting rid of the body.”

 

\-- 

 

_After he is released from the facility, it is the last of Patrick or his father that Nathan sees for a very long time. In fact, Nathan is told he isn’t allowed to speak to his father at all. “Not after he let you …” his mom starts. She stares down at the floor for a moment, letting the sentence hang there, as if she can make the past disappear by not acknowledging it._

 

_“What? Take his gun?” Nathan challenges her._

 

_Her lips are tight. “I don’t want to talk about this.”_

 

_“I took it.” He stalks her down the hallway, where she is depositing a laundry basket in the back room. He follows her so closely that his toes are nipping at her heels. “I took that gun, and Dad had no idea.”_

 

_She’s ignoring him, settling the basket down on the daybed, getting ready to fold its contents. Her entire face is pinched and she is deliberately not looking at him. He feels the blood simmering under his skin. It feels like being a ghost._

 

_“Are you listening to me? **I** took the gun,” says Nathan, “and if we’re talking about irresponsible parenting, it was right under your roof in some dingy little box under my bed for **months** , while you let your boyfriend—”_

 

_“I don’t want to talk about this!” his mother says shrilly. Her eyes are desperate and bulging. The towel she is folding is shaking, outstretched in her hands._

 

_Nathan bites his lip roughly, feeling the peel of dead skin. “You can’t keep me from him. He’s my **dad.** ”_

 

_She won’t say another word about it. He leaves in a huff, knocking down the laundry basket as he goes for extra measure, then slamming the door to his room hard enough that the neighbors hear it. He grabs the phone installed in his room and dials his father’s number. He calls it again and again and again and gets the message machine every time._

 

_A week passes. Still, Nathan calls. He doesn’t leave messages, getting more and more frantic with each call; it isn’t a coincidence, his father is ignoring him, must really hate him more than Nathan initially thought._

 

_The one voicemail he does end up leaving is unplanned and hateful: “ **Fuck** you. Fuck all of you. I **hate** you.” He takes one more shuddering breath. There must be something more to say, but there isn’t. He slams the phone back down on the receiver, rips the cord out of the wall and chucks it across the room._

 

_If that’s how it’s going to be, then fine. Nathan has lived most of his life without his father, he sure as fuck doesn’t need him now and he’s not going to spend one more day sniveling about it like a needy child. He stares at the broken phone across the room, the bits of cracked plastic strewn in front of his closet. Fine. **Fine**._

 

\-- 

 

It turns out Simon has already taken care of the body. Nathan doesn’t ask him any questions after that—he figures in the weeks left that they have of community service and the years left that they have inextricably twisted into each other’s lives, bound by their freakish abilities, that he’ll have time to either thank him or castrate him or whatever it is he decides to do.

 

The one thing Nathan does decide to say is this: “I’m sorry. For shoving you the other night.”

 

Simon smiles the barest of smiles. The skin under his eyes is dark and puffy and tired. He extends a hand to help Nathan up, and for some reason Nathan takes it, thinking that maybe he has misjudged Simon more than any of them.

 

The sentimentality doesn’t last very long. As soon as Simon leaves Nathan breaks into the storage room where they hide the liquor and drinks and drinks, drinks himself stupid and silly and _fucked_. The world is swaying under his feet like a carnival ride but it isn’t enough. He drinks until his eyelids are heavy and his walk is wobbly and everything feels distorted and different and new.

 

He wanders out after taking what is probably his tenth shot in two hours and realizes he is _angry_. No—he isn’t just angry—he’s _furious_ , the black-hearted, insatiable kind of fury that comes with betrayal and uncertainty and years of hating himself. And somehow in this indignant haze, this immeasurable hatred that he has built up inside of him for so long, he wanders outside with a fifth of rum and flags down a car.

 

He is just coherent enough to remember his father’s address. He hates himself a little bit for remembering it, for always knowing where to find him, like a planet that can’t escape his orbit. He rambles to the driver the whole way there, candidly saying things like, “Hey, do you want a swig of my rum?” and, “Man, do you have any idea what it’s like to be raped in the ass?”

 

He pays the man in spare coins and tumbles out of the car. He hears the tires screech away as he makes it up the front walk, and he almost stops short.

 

The door. It’s busted in.

 

Something rings in the back of Nathan’s mind, some sort of caution or reminder, but he’s way too buzzed to acknowledge it and keeps walking forward, kicking aside a piece of the broken doorframe and letting himself into his father’s flat.

 

“Hey, fucktard!” he calls. There’s broken glass on the floor. An idea is trying to wrap around his brain, _something bad has happened here_ , but there’s no filter, no room for logical thought left in his brain. He kicks a piece of furniture and watches without much concern as a lamp hits the floor and shatters loudly. “It’s _me_ , Dad, you fucking _ass_ _cunt_ , shitfaced—”

 

His dad comes skyrocketing out of the hall, looking at him with absolute incomprehension. “What the hell,” he says, his gaze shifting from Nathan to the mess on the floor back to Nathan again. “What are you _doing?_ ”

 

“Fuck you, what am I doing,” Nathan says, feeling bold, feeling livid. His father’s eye is bruised and he seems to be limping, but Nathan’s capacity for mercy has _long_ since been pushed to its breaking point. “The _fuck_ is your problem anyway, you fucking _ass_ , do you have any idea—”

 

“Are you _drunk?_ ”

 

“You better fucking _believe_ I’m drunk, you insurmountable _prick_ ,” Nathan exclaims, jabbing a finger at his father’s chest for emphasis.

 

“Back off,” says his father, swatting him right back, “what’s the matter with you?”

 

“The matter with _me?_ ” Nathan takes a step back from him and laughs, dark and throaty. He laughs so hard he has to clutch his stomach. He laughs so hard he thinks he might never stop. And then, abruptly, he does. Because it isn’t funny, not at all. “Hey, guess who’s back in town, Dad? _Patrick!_ ”

 

He sees his father visibly flinch.

 

“You know the one, mum’s boyfriend, the one who _beat_ me and _raped_ me for months, _that_ charming fellow.”

 

He’s hoping to get a reaction out of him, to watch his father shrink back in guilt or at least have the decency to look halfway remorseful, but instead he watches as the blood seems to drain out of the other man’s face. “You saw him?”

 

Nathan scowls at him. “Of course I fucking _saw_ him, how else would I—”

 

“He was here. A few hours ago.”

 

“ _What?_ ”

 

And then the gears start turning. In his rum-guzzled haze Nathan backs up, and takes in the destruction of the room. The unhinged door and the broken glass. His father’s eye and the limp. _He was going to kill someone. The man whose flat he busted into._

 

Nathan sinks to the ground. He’s not sure why. The buzz is crashing down and his limbs are so heavy, he’s been running for so long. He feels the crunch of glass shards under his knees, but he’s so wasted that the pain is almost a relief, something that cuts through the numbness of his skin and forces him back into the moment, back into his father’s flat with the hum of the radiator and flap of the exposed window curtain in the breeze.

 

“Did he—he had this, it was the weirdest—I couldn’t _move—_ ”

 

“I know.” Nathan looks straight up at him, accusing, wild. “You think I don’t _know?_ ” He feels his chin quivering. He isn’t going to cry. It’s rage, just pure, unadulterated rage, trying to find some outlet to escape him. “He _found_ me, and the whole thing just—it happened all over again, except this time the motherfucking cunt _killed_ me.”

 

His father mutters something under his breath. “Nathan …”

 

“Is this a bad time to mention I’m immortal? Because I am. I _literally_ can’t die. Here,” he says, holding up a particularly large shred of glass up to his neck, “wanna watch? Give me like twenty minutes, tops, I swear to _God,_ I’ll pop right back up—”

 

“Nathan, _Jesus_ , stop it.” When Nathan looks up again his father is in front of him, kneeling down, crunching in the glass beside him. He yanks the makeshift weapon out of Nathan’s hand. Nathan doesn’t fight him, his limbs pliant from booze. “What are you—you can’t do that, are you on drugs?”

 

“Nope,” says Nathan, “nope, siree, just a fucked up juvenile delinquent getting stalked by a rapist pedophile, and surprise, I’m going to live forever. Isn’t that … peachy.”

 

He stiffens when his father doesn’t answer right away. They kneel there, uncomfortable and awkward with the broken glass crunching under them. “So he—did he …”

 

Nathan intentionally presses his hand on the floor, feeling the little pricks of blood as the shards sink in. They’ll be healed in an hour. “Yes,” says Nathan. He looks his father in the eye this time. He has nothing to be afraid of now, nothing to lose. Patrick is already dead and his relationship with his father is already down the shithole. “Yes, he did. _Again_.”

 

His voice breaks and seems to echo through the room, bouncing back off the walls to humiliate him, to make him feel weak. Still, he doesn’t look away, staring at his father, challenging him. If he’s going to ignore Nathan, if he’s going to abandon him like he did last time, he won’t be able to slink out of Nathan’s life like a coward in the dark. He’ll do it right here and right now and Nathan will finish with him forever.

 

“I’m sorry, Nathan,” his father says. He tries to raise a hand to touch Nathan’s shoulder, or maybe his face, but Nathan jerks his body away before he can try.

 

“Bullshit, you’re sorry,” says Nathan, standing abruptly, brushing the debris of his pant legs.

 

“Why are you so angry with me?” his father asks, looking so genuinely bewildered that it takes every morsel of self-control Nathan possesses not to sock him in the jaw.

 

Nathan grits his teeth. “Are you _joking_ ,” he manages. “You—you _left_ me. After what happened with Patrick. You—you—walked right out that day, after I told you what happened, and—and I _called_ you, I tried, for weeks, for _months_ , and—” He needs to reroute himself. He feels his throat tightening, feels the alcohol making him loose and sloppy and he can’t afford to cry here. “I mean, I got the message, loud and clear, _Dad_. You couldn’t look at me. You couldn’t look at your own son—”

 

“You stop it,” his father yells, and Nathan is so surprised by the volume of it that he takes a step back and shuts himself up. His father is on his feet now too, and it’s strange, because Nathan has got at least eight inches on him but for some reason he’s more intimidated by his father now than he ever was as a kid.

 

“That’s—I don’t know what your mother told you,” his father says, “but I couldn’t have taken your calls, I couldn’t have seen you. I was in jail, Nathan.”

 

Nathan shakes his head. “What—no. That—how the fuck did you—how could you be in _jail?_ ”

 

“For beating the _shit_ out of Patrick,” his father says, his voice low and grim. He looks at Nathan, his features hard and unreadable, with the same ominous quality that he had back in that hospital room all those years ago. “That’s the first thing I did when I left you, Nathan. I got in a car, drove to that prick’s flat, and beat him fucking senseless.”

 

All Nathan can hear is the sound of his own breathing, loud and ragged. After everything that has happened to him in the past few weeks, let alone his entire shitty life, he couldn’t imagine something shocking him this much. He clutches a hand to his chest as if he is actually expecting something to burst.

For a moment he almost wishes his father were lying. He doesn’t want to look back on the years he has treated his father like shit, now that he knows that his father was in his corner fighting for him, trying to love him the only way he knew how.

 

“I didn’t know,” Nathan finally says. Reality seems to distort itself as the last eight years flicker through his mind, his mother’s thin excuses and the disconnected phone lines and the sudden, inexplicable move to a flat across town a week after his thirteenth birthday. “How long were you …”

 

“A year,” his father says. Nathan’s eyes must bulge at this, because his father’s harden and he says, “I don’t regret it. I would’ve killed him if I had the chance. Some neighbor called the police or he’d be a dead man.”

 

Nathan feels overcome by a strange mixture of gratitude and shame and disbelief. He is only a few inches away from the couch and sinks onto the armrest. How could his mother have kept this from him? How could his father never have mentioned what he did, not even once, after spending a year in jail for it? He looks up at his father and it starts to make sense—the bitterness, the gruff way he always dealt with Nathan, the way they always fought. The entire time his father thought that Nathan was taking him for granted, that he didn’t care at all what he had sacrificed on Nathan’s behalf.

 

Nathan doesn’t know what to say. A “thank you” seems almost insulting, after everything they’ve been through, after all the bad blood that has been shared.

 

“I can’t explain what happened after he busted through the door, though.” His father has evidently moved on from Nathan’s mind-blowing revelation, and is staring at the broken doorframe contemplatively. “For some reason I was frozen. I couldn’t move. He did that, didn’t he?”

 

Nathan nods.

 

“But—he couldn’t always do that, right?” his father asks, still staring at the door as if he is scrutinizing every moment of the attack, every moment that led up to this moment now.

 

“No. Dad, I—”

 

“And just when I was certain he was going to kill me, it was like—some invisible force, or a _person_ , or something—I don’t know. It killed Patrick. I went into the kitchen to phone the police and then his body was gone.”

 

Nathan exhales. He can’t decide if his blood-alcohol level is going to muddle up this whole story or vastly improve the endurance of it, but it’s been years of shutting his father out, shutting everybody out, and if he’s really going to have to live with this fucking immortality forever then maybe he ought to start making amends with the few people who actually give a shit about him.

 

“It’s like this, Dad.” He takes another breath, wondering where to start, and decides he’ll save the big, long stories for later. He’s got time. He’s got way too much of it. “It all started with that storm a few months ago.”

 

\-- 

 

_Nathan doesn’t want to go to therapy._

 

_“I made it up,” he tells his mother. His hands are balled into fists in his lap. He doesn’t look at her. He is ashamed. “I made the whole thing up.”_

_He doesn’t think it will be so easy for her to believe him. He thinks surely after everything that has happened—the gun against his lips, the look on Patrick’s face when she confronted him, the way the bastard skipped town before anyone could ask anything more—surely she will see past this lie._

_She doesn’t. His mother sits on the couch, the light of the morning sun hitting her face in patterned shafts from the blinds. She starts to shake her head, looking weary, looking finished. “How could you do that to him,” she says after a moment. Her eyes have never been so cold. “To **me**?”_

_Hot tears prick at the bottom of Nathan’s eyes. “I don’t know,” he says. The answer doesn’t seem to suffice for his mother, so he adds a quiet, “I’m just no good.”_

 

_And even he believes it._

 

_The therapist calls the house six times. Nathan knows because she always calls when his mother is at work; before she comes home he methodically deletes all of the messages, her pleas to hear from them, insisting that she has seen too many children like Nathan over the years and that they cannot anticipate the long lasting psychological and emotional consequences of discontinuing therapy when he needs it the most._

 

_Every time he listens to one of the messages he can almost feel the skin around his body thickening, imagining that all of him is as tough at the skin on the back of his heel. It’s bullshit. He doesn’t need therapy. He doesn’t need his mother to look at him like he is some kind of aberration, some freak of nature that stole her boyfriend away from her. He doesn’t need his father, with the string of unanswered calls and missed birthdays and not giving a shit. Patrick is gone, and that’s all that really matters. He is gone and he is never coming back._

 

\-- 

 

Nathan spends the next hour telling his father everything, at least everything he can think of. Some things will have to wait—there are truths Nathan isn’t even ready to face himself, and years that can’t all be explained away with a sweeping apology, but he tries to include all the relevant parts. He tells him about the storm. He knows that he probably shouldn’t, but he tells his father about everyone else and their abilities, too. His father refers to them as his friends at one point, and Nathan almost snorts, about to correct him, and then comes to a weird, gratifying realization that yeah, maybe they are his friends. Kelly let him spend the night. Simon _killed_ a man for him.

 

There are a few points he’s afraid his father won’t believe him. He tries to be careful about narrating with overly-colorful detail or undermining his credibility with his usual shit-eating grins. His father cuts in every now and then, particularly when Nathan mentions the storm—his father was out of town when it happened, and managed not to hear about any of it on the news—but mostly he is patient and quiet and solemn, even when Nathan starts getting to the most ludicrous bits.

 

When Nathan gets to the immortality part again, his father looks up after a long time of not speaking and says, “A few weeks ago. Your mother told me—she told me you were dead.”

 

Nathan doesn’t look at his father, uncomfortable with how the mood has shifted. He meant to sound triumphant, to make a joke of the whole thing, but the truth is he hasn’t even seen his father since his alleged death and has no idea how the man even reacted, no indication that he even knew. Nathan assumed, as he usually did, that his mother informed him when Nathan made a miraculous return from the dead, and when his father asked him about it on the phone Nathan flippantly told him he faked the whole thing for tax evasion purposes.

 

“Uh, yeah. The thing is, I was.” There’s an uncomfortable silence, and Nathan finds himself talking through it just to fill it up, unable to stop himself. “Funny thing is, nobody knew, right? It’s like, everyone just thought I didn’t _have_ a power, well except for me of course, I knew it’d be something off the A List, but those wankers didn’t believe me for a second. Buried me alive, in fact.”

 

Out of the corner of his eyes he can see his father look up in alarm.

 

“Two weeks ‘til they dug me up.” Nathan isn’t sure why he’s saying it, but maybe he needs to say it to someone. He exhales loudly, arching his back on the couch, trying to sound casual about the whole thing. “Mum was so shocked she fainted! Knocked out some teeth, it was all a big mess, but I guess that’s what happens when you’ve got a kid like me, huh.”

 

“Nathan …”

 

“It’s pretty awesome, though, it’s got its perks,” says Nathan, desperate to interrupt his father, feeling like a ball of yarn unraveling as a cat drags it through the house. His face is growing hot even though he is pretty sure he isn’t drunk anymore and he says, “I’m gonna live forever. It’s like, I’m completely invincible, I can go anywhere, do anything I want.” The prospect seems suddenly terrifying to him, but he keeps talking, not sure who he is trying to convince. “I’ve died twice already, can you imagine that? It’s like, it just goes dark, like I’m asleep, then _wham_ , there I am, like fucking Jesus except better because nobody can kill me with a few stones or whatever it was they used to murder that bloke. I’ll probably live until the end of time. Everyone I know will be dead, and it’ll just be me and the waste of the universe and all the prepackaged snacks that survive the nuclear holocaust.”

 

He makes a little explosion gesture, waggling his fingers for emphasis, trying to disguise the fact that parts of him are shaking. It’s weird, telling his father about this. It makes it concrete and real and inevitable and the whole thing seems so disappointing, so unnerving.

 

Everyone is going to die. Nathan’s known this since he was a little kid, he doesn’t need someone to explain biology and human nature, and he’s always used the fact that he is going to die one day to justify all of his impulsiveness and risk-taking. But now it all seems so pointless. There’s no thrill, no smugness anymore. He feels empty. He feels stupid. He feels invalidated and used up and _afraid_.

 

He is momentarily pulled out of his mounting internal panic by the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulder. Nathan looks up at him blearily, trying to blink away the obvious terror in his eyes, feeling like an exposed nerve. His father’s gaze isn’t exactly steady—it never has been, even in their most intimate moments, but it’s as reassuring of a look as a man like his father can muster.

 

“We’ll figure this out, Nathan,” he says, his voice gruff.

 

Nathan laughs softly. He feels the urge bubble up, the urge to tell his father he’s full of shit and has _no idea_ what he’s talking about, not even the slightest clue of the insanity and the agony that Nathan has been through in the past few months, in his entire _life_ , but he resists. Het lets the muscles in his torso relax, lets his father believe he can take care of this, because it’s a nice thought. It’s a nice sentiment. And that’s the closest either of them has been to having a normal relationship since Nathan was too small to talk.

 

His father asks where he’s been living and Nathan doesn’t lie to him the way he lied to his mother. His father isn’t entirely surprised when Nathan admits he’s been hiding out in the community center, but Nathan is certainly surprised when his father offers him a place to stay, at least until he can sort things out. They both know that Nathan’s ability to sort things out is not a short-term, couple of days kind of matter, which makes the gesture even more confusing to Nathan, who isn’t used to his father offering anything.

 

Together they drive to the community center, where Nathan sheepishly picks the lock and runs upstairs to shove his makeshift bed under some old supplies (just in case) and grab his two bags. They go home and fix up the door the best they can, and cover the windows with saran wrap. Mending, but not perfect.

 

Nathan crashes on the couch, feeling exhaustion seep into his bones, the kind of fatigue that he has been shaking off and blustering through ever since he can remember. He lets his eyes sink closed, lets himself go limp against the cushions, and for the first time since this whole immortality thing kicked in, he lets himself be optimistic about the future. So he isn’t going to die today, or tomorrow, or maybe not for a thousand years, but it’s not a complete waste of time. People care about him, in their own fucked-up ways. If he’ll have to live through a thousand more years of hurt, at least there’s a somewhat less bleak prospect that he might have friends to back him up.

 

It isn’t quite the same thing as looking up, or looking forward, but just before he loses his coherency and sleep starts to claim him, Nathan is sure of one thing: he’s finished looking back.

 

 

 


End file.
